A beef with crickets

More and more often the feeling wells up that one is being got at – nagged. For many, this reaction will set in when they hear a team of scientists in Helsinki insisting that, if we ate crickets instead of beef, the environment would be grateful, the climate soothed and we should be healthy, happy and our Premium Bonds would come up more frequently. We do not want to eat crickets, thank you. When we read in the Bible that the ascetical John the Baptist ate locusts in the desert, the notion of munching winged insects was so improbable that some tried to explain it away as his eating locust beans. In Asia, they might eat crickets, but they eat all sorts of things there (dogs, in some parts, for heaven’s sake). We can still save the poor planet while eating the Roast Beef of Old England. To make us eat crickets is not cricket.